How Do I Increase My Click-Throughs?

Suzie from Phoenix, Arizona is miffed. He ranks on the first few pages of Google but isn’t getting many click-throughs to his site. Bummer.

Dear Pete-

I’ve read a few of your posts about click-through optimization. What’s your secret to increasing mine? Appreciate any help you can send my way.

-Suzie

Okay, it’s a question I hear often but Suzie, you need to change the way you’re thinking. Forget about stuffing your snippets with dumb text which rambles on and on. Instead, think about what people see on the search results pages you reside. Start by answering these questions:

Do your listings have a compelling offer?

Do you use the word phrase [VIDEO] in your site/post titles?

Have you updated your Google Authorship tag in your content?

Reverse the curse of hoping you’ll snag click-throughs just because. These days people need more than your site appearing on the first few pages to check out your content. So should you change your titles? Yes.

Here’s a secret most SEO firms won’t even consider doing. Add video to your ranking pages or posts. The reason is you want to update your page titles that appear high on the search engines to include the word phrase [VIDEO]. Chances are good your competition doesn’t use the word video in their listings. So by having a title reading ‘free [VIDEO]’ you’re more likely to sway searchers to clicking your position listing.

Another step is to add the Google Authorship tags in your site content. But be patient. It takes time for Google Authorship code to get indexed. Once it does, your authorship profile picture will appear next to your position link.

I’m as guilty as you if you don’t have your Google Authorship tags set up properly. For months I waited after confirming my email address @pdgseo.com outlined in their set up advice. Yet, there was a missing piece of code in my profile.. Once I updated my snippet using my Google+ profile, my authorship photo appeared. Here’s Google’s set up instructions.

Suzie, this stuff takes time. But if I were you, I would first go the video route. Start tagging all your SEO titles with the word [VIDEO]. Of course you need video of your own embedded on your site. Don’t simply steal someone else’s YouTube embed code and put it on your site. It’s lame and will water down your content as well as your brand.

About Me

I work with a handful of good IT and product clients. Their projects are the only thing that matters to me. Well, besides my kids and of course the Red Sox and Patriots and...